UFO Info Week-End

Whenever anybody delivers a cynical what-has-Labour-ever-done rant I think of her

Whenever anybody delivers a cynical what-has-Labour-ever-done rant, I think of her.Yet – like most single mums – she seems to think that these measures descended autonomously from Social Services, without any political decisions behind them. It might not sound much to metropolitan Independent readers, but if you live on an estate in Lancashire, £40 is the difference between getting by and sinking into a bleak cycle of debt and ever-inflating repayments. She earns £20,000 as a nurse in an NHS hospital, and it would be very tough to raise her five year-old son on her own and have a decent life for herself with that income. But under our Labour government, she is given an extra £40 a week through the Child Tax Credit they have introduced – and it comes on top of her £15 in child benefit. My sister is such a good example of a hard-up single mum who has benefited so much from having a Labour government that she could be hired by Gordon Brown as a mascot. This perverse situation has come about because all these moves were slipped through, unspun and unnoticed, as though from the basement of Number 10, far from the public gaze.Another example.

Not even Roy Jenkins, in his most progressive phase as Home Secretary, delivered as much as this.Yet now, gay people, instead of loving Blair, are convinced – like everyone else who has benefited from Blair’s progressivism – , despite the evidence of their own eyes, that he is just another Tory who has done nothing for them. Tony Blair leads the most pro-gay government we have ever had. If in 1997 you had forecast that within a few years we would have de facto gay marriage, an equal age of consent, and openly gay men and women in the armed forces, most of us gay people would have partied in a way that made Mardi Gras look like a Presbyterian funeral. It’s another typical week.If we look at how the Government has handled gay issues for the past six and a half years, we can see this pattern even more clearly. In the past week, we have heard all about the Government’s new “Britishness” test for immigrants (with a stamp of approval from Norman Tebbit), but nothing about its decision to end a policy that made it impossible for teachers to deal properly with homophobic bullying. No; this is a column about New Labour’s complete failure to publicise its many progressive achievements, while screeching out its reactionary policies in a ceaseless wail. Lord Bassam, one of the government whips, rightly describes it as “a watershed vote”.
Don’t worry: this isn’t a column on Section 28 – an issue, like fox-hunting, about which we seem to have been arguing for millennia.

The product of Margaret Thatcher’s gay-bashing spasm will be taken off the statute books by the start of the new legislative year. In the House of Lords, for the first time, a majority of peers voted to scrap this piece of legislative homophobia, after it was tacked on to the current Local Government Bill as an amendment. Section 28 died this week, and nobody noticed. Who knows how many corpses they would find in the morgue?”The Baghdad communiqu?are belated, insincere, incomplete Things are far worse than we have been told… We are today not far short of a disaster.” The writer was describing the crumbling British occupation of Iraq, under guerrilla attack in 1920 His name was Lawrence of Arabia
More from Robert Fisk. No wonder journalists now have to seek permission from the occupation authorities to visit Baghdad hospitals.